OPINION:
Web searches on assisted suicide yield strange results. Articles on states that have enacted “death with dignity” laws show how they use a common language of compassion and choice. Underneath are websites announcing that “Help is available,” replete with phone numbers for a 24/7 suicide prevention hotline. One view distinguishes between “good suicide” and “bad suicide” on some shifting ground referring to human consent. Another view sees suicide as always wrong. Our culture must choose one.
The view distinguishing good from bad suicide is gaining ground. Thirteen jurisdictions now condone assisted suicide. Delaware joined the list in May, followed by Illinois in December. Groups such as Death with Dignity celebrate the developments, writing that they “work to create a future in which all Americans have the freedom to make their own end-of-life decisions.” Advocates even peddle the narrative that state-sanctioned suicide is patriotic.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul argues that assisted suicide embodies American freedom. “In the true spirit of this country,” she writes, “government has a responsibility to protect, not interfere, with an individual’s deeply personal decisions.” All freely chosen suicide is good, Ms. Hochul seems to think, and interfering with such a sacred right of liberty is immoral.
She hopes people who oppose suicide can “look with compassion on those who” want to commit suicide. “Isn’t that,” she asks, “at heart, what the choice and freedom our young nation promised its people 250 years ago is all about?” It seems compassion for the suicidal means affirming their lives are no longer worth living. If Ms. Hochul were consistent, she would target suicide prevention lines next.
The other view looks askance at suicide generally and physician-assisted suicide. The Anglo-American legal tradition has long been rife with prohibitions against suicide. Every state outlawed suicide and attempted suicide at the time of the American founding. “The blessings of liberty” never included the “right to suicide.” Indeed, as the Supreme Court has acknowledged, there is “no significant support for the claim that a right to suicide is so rooted in our tradition that it may be deemed ‘fundamental’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’”
Ms. Hochul is correct in one respect. Assisted suicide indeed strikes at the heart of American freedom. It does so by threatening to compromise the moral and religious foundation upon which it was built.
This republic was founded upon the recognition that “all men are created equal, endowed by God with certain unalienable rights.” Although the focus is often on the fact that rights cannot be granted or conferred by the government, few recognize an equally important corollary: They cannot be given up either. “Unalienable” is defined as “incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred.” The government isn’t the source of our rights, but neither, according to the Founders, are we.
The Founders understood the right to life as unalienable because we are not self-making beings. Our identities are formed in connection with our traditions, communities and God. The Constitution was not written for self-interpreting orphans but for a “moral and religious people,” as John Adams put it. Moral and religious people follow an authority outside their will. With this conception of human nature in mind, our nation pursued the blessings of liberty — interpreted not as a license to do whatever one pleases but a liberty to live according to nature.
Assisted suicide reduces human nature to a self-interpreting orphan, disconnecting life’s purpose from God, family and tradition. Look no further than the common slogan “death with dignity.” To place the uncontrollable — death and suffering — into our own hands is the ultimate affirmation of our dignity. Self-determination appears as the “essence” of humanity.
Reducing human nature to self-determination renders suffering absurd. Individuals who must determine “their truth” cannot integrate pain and death into their life plans by choice. Suffering is as guaranteed as death, and we all move closer to both every day. Attempts to contain assisted suicide to dying and suffering people present no limits on suicide at all.
Albert Camus likened human pain and suffering to the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus. For his sins, the gods punish Sisyphus to push a rock up a hill, only to have it slip back down — for eternity. Sisyphus’ fruitless life is much like ours. Camus hopes this objective lack of meaning prompts human beings to create meaning for themselves. If Sisyphus is the one who decides to assign meaning to his life’s work, then he can also deny it. Self-defining people easily become self-destroying people.
Applied culturally, that spells a grave loss of human life. “Medical assistance in dying” now accounts for roughly 5% of Canadian deaths. Moreover, studies have found that in places where assisted suicide is legalized, overall suicide rates increase. It turns out that when you destigmatize suicide for some, you destigmatize it for all.
In accepting assisted suicide, cultures trade the Founders’ articulation of unalienable rights with a Sisyphean picture of the human condition. Our institutions will be undermined, many of which presuppose an authority outside oneself and require self-sacrifice and even suffering for the sake of greater reward.
Religious life and the rule of law presuppose external authority and hierarchy, and the family is held together by vows that endure unconditionally. Assisted suicide reframes the “good life” as one that is free from hardship and limitations on personal choice. That life script is at odds with a view that sees authority, duty and sacrifice as essential not only to our self-understanding but also to the broader social order. This includes the mediating institutions that restrict encroaching state power.
This danger is intrinsic to assisted suicide. Although concerns about New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act prompted amendments meant to provide additional safeguards, it will fail in curbing a culture of death. Americans must forge strong families, communities and churches that reject the false gospel of self-creation and the destruction that comes with it.
• Liana Graham is a research assistant for domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation.
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